A very different person from these in scholarly attainments, in natural gifts, and (it must unfortunately be added) in personal respectability, was Richard Porson, who is generally bracketed with Bentley as the greatest of English scholars, not of our own day, and who might have been one of the most brilliant of men of letters. He was born in Norfolk on Christmas Day 1759, of low station, but was well educated by the parson of the parish, and sent to Eton by a neighbouring squire. In 1779 he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, obtained a scholarship, did brilliantly in University contests and became fellow in 1782. Although he was almost a boy the genius of his papers in scholarship attracted notice at home and abroad, and he made some excursions into general literature wherein, as in his recorded conversations, he showed epigrammatic wit of the first rank. He lost his fellowship because he would not take orders; but was made Regius Professor of Greek, an appointment which unluckily was then, in both Universities, almost honorary as regards income. The Whig party accepted his partisanship, but had no opportunity of rewarding it, and after receiving the Librarianship of the London Institution in Moorfields, he died of apoplexy in 1808. He possessed in almost the highest degree that power of divination, based on accurate knowledge, which distinguishes the scholar, and it is, as has been said, nearly certain that he would have been a brilliant writer in English on any subject he chose to take up. But he was a hopeless drunkard, an offensive sloven, rude and aggressive in society—in short a survival of the Grub Street pattern of the century of his birth. This period, which was that of Burney, Elmsley, Gaisford, and other scholars, robust but not very literary (except in the case of Elmsley, who was a contributor both to the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Reviews), was succeeded by one in which the English Universities did not greatly distinguish themselves in this department. Gaisford indeed lived till 1855 at Oxford, and Cambridge produced among other respectable scholars the already mentioned Malden and George Long (1800-79), a Lancashire man, who went to Trinity, distinguished himself greatly, but found such preferment as he met with outside his university, in America, at University College, London, and elsewhere. Long was a great diffusion-of-useful-knowledge man, and edited the Penny Cyclopædia: but he did more germane work later in editing the Bibliotheca Classica, an unequal but at its best excellent series of classics, and in dealing with the great stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. He was also one of the mainstays of the most important enterprise of the middle of the century in classical scholarship, the Classical Dictionaries edited by the late Sir William Smith and published by Mr. Murray; and he wrote an extensive but not extraordinarily valuable Decline of the Roman Republic. Long appears to have been one of those men who, with great ability, vast knowledge, and untiring industry, somehow or other miss their proper place, whether by fault or fate it is hard to say.
About 1860 three remarkable persons illustrated scholarship in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh respectively, with a combination of literary and linguistic knowledge which had been growing rarer up to their time, and which has grown rarer still since.
The Oxford representative was John Conington, who was born at Boston on 10th August 1825. He went to Rugby and to Magdalen College, Oxford, whence he migrated to University College, and there obtained a fellowship, making nearly a clean sweep of the chief University prizes meanwhile. He became in 1854 the first Professor of Latin, and held the post till his death in 1869. He edited Virgil, Æschylus (part) and Persius, translated Horace, Homer, and Virgil, and did a certain amount of miscellaneous literary work. He was neither a very exact nor a very great scholar: his scholarship indeed took rather the character of that of foreign nations, other than Germany, than the dogged minuteness of German, or the large but solid strength of English study of the classics. But he was an exceedingly stimulating professor; and coming at the time when it did, his work was valuable as a reminder that the classics are live literature, and not so much dead material for science.
Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, a native of Elgin, where he was born in 1819, a Shrewsbury boy and a scholar and fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who became Professor of Latin there in 1869 and died in 1882, was an incomparably greater verbal scholar than Conington, and may fairly be said to have taken up the torch of Bentley and Porson. His great edition (with a less great translation) of Lucretius, his work on Horace and Catullus, and his scattered papers, all come up to a very high standard; and in the delightful art of Greek and Latin composition in verse, where England has long stood paramount, and which, since she has abandoned it, remains uncultivated throughout Europe, he was almost supreme. But Munro, though he never surrendered wholly to the philological heresy, was affected thereby; and some of his Lucretian readings were charged with a deficiency in ear such as that with which he justly reproached his German predecessors.
The most strictly literary of the three has yet to be mentioned. William Young Sellar, born near Golspie in the same year as Conington, was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, at the University of Glasgow, and (as a Snell exhibitioner) at Balliol. After holding an Oriel fellowship for some years, and doing professorial or assistant-professorial work at Durham and St. Andrews, he became in 1863 Professor of Humanity at Edinburgh, and remained so till his death in 1890. In the year of his election to the professorship appeared his Roman Poets of the Republic, quite the best book of its kind existing in English; and this was followed up by others on Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and Propertius—good, but less good, the mannered correctness of the Augustans evidently appealing to the author less than the more strictly poetic excellence of Lucretius and Catullus. Attempts, too few but noteworthy, have since been made to handle classical literature in the style of the Roman Poets of the Republic, but it has never been surpassed, and it has very seldom been equalled.
On another scheme and in other circumstances names like those of Kennedy and Shilleto, of Linwood and Burges, of Monk and Blomfield, would cry for admission here, but as it is they must be ruled out. And it is not possible to widen the scope much, so as to take in some eminent students who have given not unliterary expression to the study of languages and subjects other than the classical. It has indeed been a constantly increasing feature of the century that fresh studies—Ægyptology, the study of the Semitic languages, the study of the older forms not merely of English but of the other modern tongues, the enormous range of knowledge opened to Englishmen, and as it were forced on them by our possession of India and our commerce and connection with other nations of the East, as well as the newer subjects of comparative mythology, folk-lore, and the like, all more or less offshoots of what may be generally termed scholarship, have been added to the outer range of the Humanities. Some of these appeal to very few, none of them to more than few persons; and literature, in its best description if not exactly definition, is that which does or should appeal to all persons of liberal education and sympathies. Yet one exponent of these studies (and of more than one of them) must have a place here, as well for the more than professionally encyclopædic character of his knowledge as for his intellectual vigour and his services to letters.
William Robertson Smith was born in 1846, and died in 1894. A native of Aberdeenshire, the son of a Free Kirk minister, and educated at Aberdeen and elsewhere, he became Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College of that city, and for some years discussed his subject, in the manner of the Germans, without hindrance. His articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica, however, gave offence, and after much controversy he was deprived of his chair in 1881. Two years later, however, he was made Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, where he also became Fellow of Christ's and University Librarian. And from a contributor he proceeded to be first assistant-editor and then editor in chief of the Encyclopædia. His health, never very strong, became worse and worse, and he finally succumbed to a complication of diseases. It was understood that the theological scandal connected with his name was anything but a pleasure to him, and the justice of it does not concern us; but his repute as an Orientalist is uncontested. Besides works directly bearing on the Bible, he wrote two important books on Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia and on The Religion of the Semites. He was at least as remarkable for general as for special learning, and if not actually a great man of letters, had a knowledge of literature rivalled by few of his contemporaries.
To turn to physical science, Sir Humphry Davy, a great chemist and no mean writer, was born at Penzance in December 1778. His father was a wood-carver, but he himself was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, and betook himself seriously to chemistry. Fortunately for him, Dr. Beddoes, the father of the poet, a physician of great repute at Clifton, took him to be his assistant there, and Davy, in his twentieth year, not only had much improved opportunities of study, but made valuable friends, both among the persons of rank who then frequented Clifton for health, and among the literary society of which Coleridge and Southey were then the ornaments in Bristol. This part of his sojourn was noteworthy for his experiments with nitrous oxide ("laughing gas"). These attracted a great deal of attention, and in 1801, being then barely twenty-three, he was appointed to a lectureship in the Royal Institution, London. His appointment was the beginning of a series of brilliant lectures in the same place during almost the whole of the century, first by Davy himself, then by his assistant Faraday, and then by Faraday's assistant Tyndall. He was knighted in 1812, and soon afterwards married Mrs. Apreece, a lively, pretty, and wealthy widow. His later years were occupied, first by the investigations which led to the perfecting of his famous safety-lamp for coal-mines (these brought him a handsome testimonial and a baronetcy), and later by electrical researches. He had not reached middle age when his health began to fail, and he died in 1829, aged little more than fifty. In connection with literary science or scientific literature Davy was perhaps more remarkable as a lecturer than as a writer, but his accomplishments as the latter were considerable, and in his later years he wrote two non-scientific books, Salmonia and Consolations in Travel. These (though the former was attacked as the work of an amateur and a milksop by Christopher North) were very popular in their day. Davy always kept up his friendship with men of letters, especially the Lake Poets and Scott (who was a connection of his wife's), and he was no very small man of letters himself.
A contemporary (though very much longer lived) of Davy's and the most famous Englishwoman who has ever written on scientific subjects, was Mary Fairfax, better known from the name of her second husband as Mrs. Somerville. She was born at Jedburgh on 26th December 1780, and when twenty-four married her cousin, Captain Greig, a member of a family of Scotchmen who had settled in the Russian navy. Her first husband died two years afterwards, and six years later she married Dr. William Somerville, also her cousin. She had already devoted much attention, especially during her widowhood, to mathematics and astronomy; and after her second marriage she had no difficulty in pursuing these studies. She adapted Laplace's Mécanique Céleste in 1823, and followed it up by more original work on physics, astronomy, and physical geography. Her life was prolonged till 1872, and an interesting autobiography appeared a year later. It is possible that Mrs. Somerville profited somewhat in reputation by her coincidence with the period of "diffusion of useful knowledge." But she had real scientific knowledge and real literary gifts; and she made good use of both.
Of at least respectable literary merit, though hardly of enough to justify the devoting of much space to them here, were Sir David Brewster (1781-1868), Sir John Herschel (1792-1871), Sir Charles Lyell (1797-1875), Sir Roderick Murchison (1792-1871), the first a mathematician and physicist, the second an astronomer, the third and fourth geologists, and all more or less copious writers on their several subjects. John Tyndall (1820-1893), a younger man than any of these, had perhaps a more distinctly literary talent. Born in Ireland, and for some time a railway engineer, he gave himself up about 1847 to the study and teaching of physics, was remarkable for the effect of his lecturing, and held several Government appointments. His Presidential Address to the British Association at Belfast in 1874 was not less noteworthy for materialism in substance than for a brilliant if somewhat brassy style.